The secret has finally reached the general public; the way to make wealth quickly and continue to reap the benefits from it is to turn your eyes to real estate. Through the purchase and rehabilitation of various properties you can generate an incredible amount of income. Perhaps once the secret reached your ears you went one step further in the quest to learn how to make money through real estate and you discovered that the secret to making a fortune from property is not to buy and sell it, but to buy it and allow it to generate a passive income from you.

Maybe, if you were exceptionally intelligent, you even went so far as to learn that in order to make a great deal of money from generated passive income you needed to invest in a multi-family home, thereby allowing you to receive rent from multiple tenants and, if you have done your homework correctly, generate a good income for yourself above and beyond the monthly expenses of your properties. It is, however, the step you take after this that will determine precisely how far you will go in your attempts to accrue wealth.

Now that you have these properties, what are you doing with them? Are you an investor or a landlord? You may be looking at this question in askance; after all, if you own a property isn’t it your responsibility to see to it and its tenants and ensure that everything is as it should be? The answer to that is yes-and no. To quote one successful real estate investor, "Landlords deal with tenants, trash and toilets. Investors deal with tenants, travel and Tahiti.”

What does this mean, exactly? It means that investors are able to appreciate their tenants for what they can do for them without getting hung up on the little stuff. If you spend all of your time attempting to take care of the needs of your tenants you are never going to be able to look beyond that and continue to grow your empire. You want to be an investor, not a landlord. You need to be able to look beyond the day to day needs of operating your properties (if you can hire someone else to do this, all the better) and accept the fact that the tenants in your properties are not what you want to deal with. They are simply the tools to help get you where you want to go.

Tenants are a valuable commodity, and should be treated as such; if you have no one to live in your properties you are never going to be able to make any kind of income, much less a sufficient one to obtain that wealth you’ve been dreaming of. On the other hand, if you forget to keep your eyes on the goal you may find yourself so caught up in the trash and the toilets that you lose track of the big picture. So which are you-a landlord or an investor?